


If At First You Don't Succeed

by theworldwhispers



Category: Glee
Genre: AU, Complete, F/F, Fluff, M/M, One Shot, Pre-Relationship, cisgirl!Klaine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-12
Updated: 2012-10-12
Packaged: 2017-11-16 04:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theworldwhispers/pseuds/theworldwhispers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt convinces Blaine to try to braid her hair, but she doesn't know how, and it turns out that she's all thumbs.  Cisgirl!Klaine</p>
            </blockquote>





	If At First You Don't Succeed

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this fanart](http://go5669.tumblr.com/post/33434316563/i-like-gender-swap-i-cant-help-it-blaine)!

“How come you always wear your hair up in ponytails?”

Blaine sets the book she’s been reading down on the bed in front of her, looking up at Kurt.  She shrugs a bit, fingering the ends of her long, wavy hair.  “I don’t know,” she admits.  “It’s just easier.  Keeps it out of my face, you know?”

Kurt hums softly and nods before returning to highlighting passages out of her notebook.  Their big European history midterm is in three days, and the two girls had taken to spending all of their time outside of classes and Warbler practices to study.

After a moment, she picks the book up again, but barely a few paragraphs into her reading, Kurt speaks up again.  “You could braid it, you know.  Or wear headbands or something.”

Grabbing the bookmark from the side of her bed, Blaine slides her textbook shut, crawling across the bed until she’s sitting beside Kurt, both their backs to the headboard.  “And why, pray tell, are you so interested in my hair all of a sudden, Kurt Hummel?”

Kurt’s cheeks flush, and she quickly looks back down at the notebook, giving Blaine’s shoulder a playful push with her own.  “I’m – I’m just worried about the state of your hair, Blaine.  With such nice hair, it’d be a shame for it to break off because of the use of rough elastics every day.  That’s all.”

With a chuckle, Blaine digs her socked toes into Kurt’s calf to draw her attention back again, sticking her tongue out at her friend once she looks up in shock.  “Mhmm, I’m sure that’s it,” Blaine teases, her giggles only increasing when Kurt’s cheek darken a bit more.

She tries to ignore the way her heart speeds up, beating a bit more ferociously against her chest.  “For the record,” she begins again, “I don’t know how to braid.  So I just throw it up.  It’s quick and easy.”

The notebook falls out of Kurt’s hands, and she looks up at Blaine with an incredulous look.  “You don’t know how to braid?  I thought all little girls grew up braiding the hair of their dolls.”

Blaine shrugs, suddenly finding her Dalton-issued bedspread incredibly interesting.  “I always tried to be more like Cooper while I was growing up, so I never really… asked for dolls for holidays, you know?  I spent most of my time trailing him and his friends around outside, trying to get them to let me play.  I guess I just never had the chance to learn.”

Kurt gives Blaine a sad sort of look before reaching over and patting her thigh twice.  “Well, it’s never too late to learn!”

“What do you mean?”

Reaching up into her hair, Kurt pulls out the couple of bobby pins that were holding it up in a messy bun.  She shakes her head once to loosen it, and suddenly her long, chestnut locks are falling down around her shoulders, wavy from being twisted up all day while drying.

“Braid mine,” she encourages, scooting to sit in front of Blaine on the bed.  “Come on, B – I’ll talk you through it.”

Blaine shakes her head furiously, her own ponytail swinging back and forth behind her head.  “No, no, it’s okay.  I’ll – I’ll watch a tutorial on it later or something and try it on my own hair.  It’s fine, Kurt, really.”

“Come on,” Kurt goads.  As she situates herself on the new spot on the bed, she smooths her skirt out over her legs.  “Besides, we could both use a break.  I think if I read any more right now, I might scream.”

“Don’t do that.  Then Wes will come running and we’ll have to listen to another long lecture about the delicacies of the human voice and how we all have to save ourselves for the concert next week.”

Kurt rolled her eyes, combing her fingers through her hair to work out some lingering knots.  “The way Wes talks, you’d think she was talking about something other than our voices entirely.”

Blaine freezes and gapes open mouthed at Kurt for a moment.  When she doesn’t feel any tugging at her hair, Kurt turns to look at Blaine over her shoulder and rolls her eyes.  “Oh, don’t give me that face, Blaine Anderson.  You sang about sex toys just a few weeks ago to that girl in the Gap.”

Her face colors even darker, and Kurt doesn’t even try to hide her laugh.  “Come on, come on.  Start braiding and I’ll drop it, I promise.”

Blaine huffs, but she brings her hands up to Kurt’s hair anyway.  “Uhm, so… what do I do first?” she asks, her fingers sliding down through the length of Kurt’s hair with ease.  It takes all of her energy not to focus on how silky and soft her hair is, how good it smells (like raspberries and mint), and instead listen to what Kurt is saying.

“Wow, you’ve really never done this before, have you?” she asks, looking over her shoulder one last time to give Blaine a smile.  “Just divide my hair into three parts.  As equal as you can make them.”

Blaine runs her thumb down the middle of the back of Kurt’s head, trying to divide her hair evenly in half first.  The part that remains is a jagged line, and she exhales hard, dropping the hair and starting over.  After a few more failed attempts, she groans.

“Kurt, do you have a comb I could use?”

Kurt looks back at Blaine again, raising an eyebrow at her.  “We’re in _your_ room, Blaine.”

“I meant, like… in your bag, or something!” she says, hands gesturing in that over-the-top way she has when she gets frustrated, pointing towards Kurt’s leather satchel on the floor.

Twisting around on the bed, Kurt reaches down to grab her bag and rifles through it quickly, but shakes her head.  “No.  I didn’t think I did, but I figured I would check just in case.  I took it out last night when I was cleaning out my bag, and I must’ve forgotten to put it back in.  Sorry,” she says, shrugging a bit.  “Surely you have one in here somewhere, though, right?”

Blaine stands and wanders over to her desk, shuffling around a few stacks of papers and books as she searches, but she finds nothing.  She shrugs out of her blazer, draping it carefully over the back of her desk chair, before walking into the adjoined bathroom.

“Aha!” she says a minute later, holding the wide-toothed comb up triumphantly.

“There’s a smile again,” Kurt says.  “Now, come on.  I want to see you do this.”

Rolling up her sleeves, Blaine settles in behind Kurt again.  This time, she runs the tip of the comb down the back of Kurt’s skull, dividing her hair into two even chunks.  The part left behind is a smooth line, and Blaine can’t help but beam, irrationally proud of herself.

“Okay, now try breaking it into thirds from there.”

Blaine pouts a bit, realizing that this means her handiwork is going to disappear, but she uses the comb to break the two chunks into three.  It takes her a couple of tries to get it into what she thinks are even pieces, but finally she carefully drops two of the pieces over Kurt’s shoulders.

“Okay, got it.  I think,” she says.

Kurt cranes her neck a bit to look in the mirror on the closet door, and though she can’t see the chunk that falls down her back still, she nods.  At least the front two seem even.

“Looks good.  Okay,” Kurt begins.  She pulls her knees up to her chest, locking her fingers underneath her thighs.  “Now, what you’re going to do is hold all three pieces between your two hands.  Got them?”

Blaine tucks one strand up into her left hand, the other two held by her right, and nods before remembering that Kurt can’t see her.  “Yeah,” she eventually says.  “Got it.  Now what?”

“Now tuck the right-most strand under the middle one and make them switch places in your hand.”

“Uhh, okay,” Blaine says, trailing off uneasily as she tries to switch the two pieces of hair in her hand.  What she ends up doing is dropping the two sections entirely.  She curses under her breath, dropping the left-most strand back over Kurt’s shoulder so that she can divide the rest back up again.

“It’s okay,” Kurt says.  “It feels weird at first.  You can do it.”

Determined, Blaine picks up the pieces and tries again, tucking the right-most piece under the middle.  Once she’s managed that, she tightens her grip on the hair, trying not to drop it.  “Okay, what next?”

“Then do the same with the left-most piece.  Tuck it under the new middle piece and make them switch.  Then you just keep repeating that over and over until you run out of hair.”

Her hands seem to have sort of gotten the hang of the weird maneuver, and Blaine grins.  At least she’s not dropping any more pieces.  She keeps braiding, the mantra of ‘ _middle, under, middle,  under_ ’ echoing in her head with each twist of hair, until there’s no hair left.

Not sure what to do now that’s finished, Blaine transfers the braid into her left hand and reaches up into her own hair to grab the hair tie.  She tugs, and her own darker brown locks fall, leaving her with a thin black band in her hand.  Quickly, she ties off the bottom of the braid and then sits back onto her feet to examine her handiwork.

She brings a hand up to her mouth to stifle her giggles.  “Pretty sure I can cross hairstylist off my list of future goals,” she says, because it looks _terrible_.  It turns out her sections weren’t as even as she thought (or perhaps her dropping two of them really messed her up), but the right side of the braid is much thinner than the left, and the entire thing is lopsided – pieces of hair sticking out at random places rather than being tucked smoothly into the twist.

Kurt leans over to look in the mirror, holding the braid off to the side of her hair to look at.  She just sort of stares for a moment, and Blaine worries that she’s going to be upset (Kurt prides herself on her hair and skin, after all), but after a moment, Kurt just laughs, louder and freer than Blaine has heard her in quite a while.

“Oh my god, Blaine,” she says, her eyes squinting almost-shut with the force of her laughter.  “This is awful.”

“I can’t help it!” she whines.  “I’m all thumbs, and you know it!  You know, I’m starting to think you just did this to laugh at me.”

Kurt turns around on the bed and wipes beneath her eyes, actually crying from how hard she had laughed.  “Of course not, Blaine.  Of course not.  Though I have to admit, that pout alone is almost worth the horrible hair day.  I didn’t know anyone could stick their lip out that far.”

Blaine rolls her eyes, but she drops the pout with a dramatic sigh.  “Fine, fine.  I’m done.  Now turn back around so I can at least try to undo the damage I’ve done.”

Obediently, Kurt turns back around and let’s Blaine undo the tie.  Blaine begins to slowly comb out the mess of a braid (and the consequential tangles) and is about half done when Kurt talks again.

“There was a reason, though.”

“I knew it,” Blaine teases, combing out a particularly weird knot.  “What was it, then?  It had to be more than just extreme boredom.”

It’s silent for a moment, and Blaine thinks that maybe Kurt isn’t going to tell her after all.  She’s just brushing out the very top of the braid when Kurt turns her head to look back at her, a soft smile on her face.

“I just wanted your hands in my hair,” she confesses.

Blaine’s hands still in her hair, and she swallows hard, her throat suddenly feeling quite dry.  “Oh.  Well.  Maybe we can… practice again sometime, then.  If I’m ever going to get it right.”

“Maybe so,” Kurt teases, the corner of her lips tugging upward.  “If at first you don’t succeed, after all.”

Blaine thinks that maybe, just maybe, they’re not talking about hair anymore.


End file.
